Technical Service Offerings with Parent Technical Service Reference

Author		Scott Lemm
Date		08/14/2020
Addresses HSD #		HSD0007988
Applicable ServiceNow Releases		All Releases
Prerequisites		CMDB and CSDM Data Foundations Dashboards
Time required		Approximately 1 to 2 hours

Audience

Configuration Manager or Configuration Management team
ServiceNow Admin or Discovery Admin
Technical Service Owner

Problem Overview

Technical service offering is a service offering type defined as a stratification of the technical service into options including localization/geography, environment, pricing, availability, capability, support group (for incident), assignment group (for change), technical approval group (for change), and packaging options (commitments).

Technical Service offerings consist of one or more service commitments that uniquely define the level of service in terms of availability, criticality, scope, pricing, and other factors. For example, an organization may offer two levels of support for an application service: a "Prod" offering of high availability and criticality for the production instances with commitments of 5 minute response guarantee 24/7: a "NonProd" offering of limited availability and criticality with commitments of 60 minute response guarantee between 8-5 on weekdays.

Technical service is a service type that is published to service owners. Using technical services lets you view and manage the technology you provide to the business. A technical service may have an operational view made up of one or more technical service offerings.

If the reference between the Technical Service Offering and its parent Technical Service are missing (unpopulated) then the Technical Service Offering will be an orphan, unable to provide data rollup to its parent for reporting purposes.

This playbook helps you identify those Technical Service Offerings without references to a parent Technical Service.

Executive Summary

How this playbook can help you achieve business goals

A technical service has an operational view made up of one or more technical service offerings. This allows for KPI reporting across a broad view of offerings within a particular Technical Service for their service owners. This reporting may include insights into total cost, outages, SLAs, and availability

How this playbook is structured

This Playbook will guide you through 3 plays.

Play 1 (an analysis play) helps you identify which Technical Service Offering CIs in your CMDB do not have a reference to a Technical Service
Play 2 (a fix play) tells you how to add a reference to a Technical Service from the Technical Service Offering form view
Play 3 (a Data Governance play) lists the guidelines and processes for reference management between Technical Service Offerings and Technical Services. Use these guidelines to maintain effective data in your CMDB.

Problem Analysis

Upstream Causes

Servicer Offerings did not exist in your original version of ServiceNow
Transforms are loading Service Offerings but not parent reference data
You may not be aware of the rewrite to Service Portfolio Management with added capabilities to Service Offerings starting in the New York release
You may not be aware that references between Service Offerings and parent Services are necessary

Downstream Consequences

Data Consequence

Data grouping to identify service performance from a collection of technical service offerings will not occur
Data silos will occur that can lead to unwelcome customizations

Operation Consequence

Erodes trust in the accuracy of the CMDB. Results in a poor user-experience
Processes that rely on measuring performance from a collection of technical service offerings will be unable to process data
Reporting will lack data, unable to associate technical service offerings to their parent technical service structure
Visibility of service performance is unknown to Technology Owners
Level 2 automated assignment, group contact often stored at the Technical Service layer, is unavailable for routing

App Consequence

Costing is unable to identify total cost without reference to technical service offering and the infrastructure stack
Service Portfolio Management is unable to rationalize Services without the parent reference from technical service offering to the parent technical service
Incidents are unable to identify level 2 provider of technical services

Impact on Your Business

Missing references from Technical Service Offering to parent Technical Service affect the following areas of your business

A poor User Experience (internal and external) making Work harder than it needs to be
Erosion of CMDB trust accompanied with a general lack of adoption & enthusiasm
Audit compliance - Unable to show service owners the performance metrics and costs of their services
Service Portfolio owners are unaware of performance indicators within their services.

Engagement Questions:

Consider the answers to these questions:

What are the major sources of Service Offerings and their parent Services in your CMDB?
Do you import data manually? If so, what process do you use? Does your process include populating critical reference attributes?

Remediation Plays

Summary

The table below lists and summarizes each of the remediation plays in the playbook. Details are included later.

Play
Play 1: Analysis	What this play is about	Identify which Technical Service Offering CIs in your CMDB do not have a reference to a parent Technical Service
Play 1: Analysis	Required tasks	Run report to help identify target CIs
Play 2: Fix - Populate Missing Reference	What this play is about	Populate missing references
Play 2: Fix - Populate Missing Reference	Required tasks	Add a reference to a Technical Service Offering from the form view
Data Governance	What this play is about	Helps you establish standard operating procedures, as well as periodic data certification
Data Governance	Required tasks	Provides detailed advice, best practices and data audit instructions

Play 1 - Analysis

What this Play is about

Identify which Technical Service Offering CIs in your CMDB do not have reference to their parent Technical Service

Required tasks

Install CMDB and CSDM Data Foundations Dashboard from the ServiceNow App Store
Navigate to the CSDM Data Foundations Dashboard module in the left navigation menu
Select the Walk tab
Select the Technical Service Offering Missing a Reference to Technical Service report to view a list of Technical Service Offering CIs that are missing a reference to their parent Technical Service

Play 2: Fix Play - Populate Missing Reference

What this Play is about

This play tells you how to add a reference to a parent Technical Service the form view of a Technical Service Offering

Required tasks

Open a Technical Service Offering CI from the Technical Service Offering Missing a Reference to Technical Service report
Scroll down to Parent (1) on the form and select the parent Technical Service
Now hit Update to save your changes

Note: The Parent attribute is a required entry of Service Offering. Your instance may not have this requirement (pre New York) or this requirement is disabled in your form view. Ensure that this attribute is required on the form.

Data Governance

What is this Play about?

This play lists the best practices and processes for technical service offering references to parent technical service

Required tasks

Periodically review the CSDM Data Foundation dashboard report to see if there are any technical service offerings missing references to parent technical services

Congratulations

You have completed this Get Well Playbook.